The funny thing about time is that a lot of us are not trained to use free time since there hasn’t been a lot of it till now.
Use it to be social, take trips, be spontaneous, learn new tricks and contribute your wisdom and experience to those around you. There is heaps to do!
Interesting
Regular naps prevent ageing…..particularly if you are driving.
Health Tips
The practice of healthy medicine allows ageing well, now you are in your 70’s you have more time to perfect it.
Maintain strength
Just because the years are ticking over does not mean you stop doing forms of resistance training. Lifting appropriate weights is crucial to maintaining muscular strength. Doing the gardening and keeping up the intensity while walking are as relevant in your 70’s as 50 years earlier. The battle is to develop muscular strength as a way to keep as much lean tissue as possible. It keeps our metabolism going and so helps avoid weight gain.
Diet
One of the enemies of the 70’s is diabetes. Very few health conditions will damage ageing well as much as diabetes. Diabetes, amongst other things, has a disastrous effect on your cardio-vascular system. It can initiate a medical merry-go-round of conditions such as high blood pressure, heart disease and renal disease. The impact of the disease and the associated pharmaceutical interventions mean that the healthy medicine approaches have to be very good to overcome the problems.
The best way to avoid diabetes is to avoid weight gain that precedes most cases of type 2 diabetes. In most cases weight gain is a choice. You have a choice to do something about it or not. Work out what your choice is.
There are possibly some foods that either you can’t eat or do not agree with your digestive system as they once did. Luckily for us we live in a world where our food choices are huge and limited only by our imaginations and cooking skills.
Be careful to maintain the fibre content of your diet.
Hydration still needs attention. For ageing people the thirst response is diminished and so the potential to become dehydrated and yet be unaware of it can increase. It may help to fill a 2 litre water container each day just to help you accurately determine how much fluid you are consuming in a day. Otherwise it may be unreliable guesswork.
Remember that a diet with fruit and vegetables can provide about 25% of your daily hydration needs.
Dehydration can cause serious problems in older adults. These problems can extend from the minor such as constipation through to serious problems such as confusion, urinary tract infections and cardio-vascular problems. Ultimately these conditions can become complicated leading to organ failure and death. Let’s get hydration right.
Try some of these suggestions
- Drink a glass of water or juice at meals and between. Be mindful of the kilojoule contributions of juice.
- Minimize coffee, tea, and drinks with caffeine.
- Increase the fluid content of your meals, try more soups and stews.
- If you have been vomiting or suffered diarrhea then increase you intake to offset the loss.
- Drink extra fluids after doing any exercise which includes gardening or vigorous domestic chores.
- Ask your pharmacist about medications that might cause water loss. A lot of medications, particularly those that work on your blood pressure can cause significant dehydration.
- If the weather warms up your water loss through perspiration increases. Up your fluid intake.
Mental
Keep your brain alert and connected. This is helped by continually trying new things, meeting people, being engaged with the world around us at a local, national and international level.
One-way dialogue with a television can be useful up to a point. It can provide information and stimulation. However, more brain engagement is to be had through talking with others and having a good laugh.
Remember that wisdom comes with age but age may come on its own.